A boutique consultancy dedicated to delivering relevant insights that guide clients through complicated decisions and uncover new ways of thinking.
Shari Allison
Principal
Shari has spent the past 20 years helping clients refine the way they look at their marketplace, their customers & their business. Co-founder of Ignite in 2011, Shari focuses on challenging convention, redefining context & delivering clarity to client partners. Although she holds advanced degrees in consumer behaviour, Shari’s expertise extends well beyond research & insights to thought-leadership & true strategic-partnership.
Stephen Tile
Principal
For the past 30 years Steve has been helping some of the biggest brands refine their target, define their messages and build their businesses. He is a consummate strategist who uses an array of research tools to deliver crisp & meaningful insights that inspire and transform.
Ignite is brought to the table when senior level, objective, thought-partners are needed to help provide clarity, focus decision-making & optimize opportunity.
Our business model allows for intimate, hands-on engagements that are flexible & provide meaningful business outcomes.
While Ignite can of course execute basic research, our sweet spot is really those issues that are strategically significant to the organization.
We focus on strategic, high-touch engagements related to…
- Market dynamics
- Brand strategy
- Brand targeting & positioning
- Brand identity
- Innovation
- Concept development
- Concept evaluation/execution
- Communication strategy
- Communication development/evaluation
Specializing in retail, travel, packaged goods, alcohol, technology, financial services & luxury goods segments.
- Ignite employs a creative range of methods to uncover insights…from traditional focus groups & online surveys to inventive interactive, observational & ethnographic approaches.
- Emphasis is on driving insights deep into organizations, either up or down, where they can be actioned — use facilitation & workshopping methods to ensure organizational enculturation.
Marketers Are Putting Their Money and Confidence in Social Media
Business to business (B2B) marketers are utilizing content marketing strategies more and more in the digital age to promote their brands. They’re becoming confident in creating content supported by the brand, such as magazines, books, articles, how-to guides and more. Social media sites facilitate the spread of this content by allowing customers to share information with other potential customers. Read...
Richard Branson on How to Make The Most of Your Network
Succeeding in business is all about making connections. While we at the Virgin Group have never hired anybody whose job description was limited to making internal and external contacts, it is implicit that almost everyone on staff has these skills. This has helped Virgin to expand into so many different industries, from music to mobile phone services: As we build connections in other areas, we have been able to grow our expertise and multiply our reach. Read...
‘Exceptionalism’ And Banksy Point To More Creative Leadership In American Cities
President Obama sided with American exceptionalism in September. British graffiti artist Banksy made street art all around New York City in October. Writer James Howard Kunstler continues to share his vision for making meaningful places in America. I’d like to synthesize their riffs to the tune of creative leadership in the key of C, as in cities. Read...4 Signs Of A Great Company Name
When one considers all the language and design elements that go into creating a brand for a company, by far, the most challenging is deciding on a name – and with good reason. Having a perfect name can accurately communicate an incredible amount about your company, while the wrong name can give the wrong impression, or worse, make you forgettable. After seeing thousands of company names over the years, we’ve managed to boil down the main qualities of a good company name to 4 big things: Read...
13 Small ‘Natural’ Brands That Are Actually Owned By Giant Corporations
Burt’s Bees is marketed as a homespun natural brand from Durham, N.C., and is proudly described as “Earth Friendly Natural Personal Care and Natural Skin Care for The Greater Good.” Of course, the brand downplays that it was sold in 2007 for nearly $1 billion to mega-corporation Clorox. Read...
The Top 20 Halloween Videos From Brands on Vine and Instagram
It’s the first big Halloween for Vine and Instagram videos. And while Tide and Oreo have been doing some scary-fun seasonal stuff on the platforms, they’re hardly the one brands feeling creepy this week. Below, check out the 20 most-shared branded Vine and Instagram videos for Halloween, ranked by Unruly Media. What other fun executions have you seen? Read...
Is Facebook Really a Failure to Marketers?
What seems to be an unfair review of Facebook’s marketing platform by respected research firm Forrester has been making the media rounds. In an open letter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst Nate Elliot takes aim at the social network’s value for marketers. With the opening sentence, “Facebook is failing marketers,” Elliot delves into why Facebook has been a less than stellar social platform for these folks. Read...
Planning Ahead: 5 Steps to Dominating in Business in 2014
This year is speeding by and 2014 is just around the corner. While many people wait until New Year’s to get their personal and professional lives in order and create the change that they know was long overdue, you shouldn’t have to. It is, after all, true that delay is the greatest form of denial. Make changes early so that you’re way ahead of the game next year with these five easy steps to prepare for dominating in business: Read...
Grow Brand Meaning To Grow Financial Value
Though times have changed, the foundational principles of good marketing have not. People still value things that they find meaningful and are predisposed to choose things that stand out from the crowd. Strong, profitable brands are meaningful to their consumers, perceived as different from the competition and are more salient – they come to mind more quickly and easily than the alternatives. Read...
In China, Under Armour Looks to Brand the Workout Experience
Earlier this month, Under Armour introduced a completely different retail concept to the Chinese sporting apparel market—a market that has proven hard to crack even for the most seasoned retail veterans, including Nike and Adidas. But Under Armour’s new Shanghai retail theater experience aims to do much more than just sell clothes and sneakers. Read...
Study: Automotive, Education Are the Toughest Sells on Facebook
When it comes to Facebook advertising, not all industries are created equal. In fact, some have a much easier time than others. That’s the gist of a new study from Unified Social, which provides a cloud-based platform for social media marketing. The study, which looked at 50,000 unique ad units from 100 brands in Q3, found cellular and telco brands acquire fans at a rate that’s 91% cheaper than average. In addition, food ads are 58% more likely to be clicked than the average Facebook ad. Four verticals — cellular/telco, gaming, desktop software and alcohol — excelled at turning clicks into fans. Read...
Warby Parker Cofounder Has a New Vision: Barbershops
It was three years before Warby Parker, a startup that began selling stylish prescription lenses online in 2010, opened up its first physical store in New York City’s SoHo district. It took Harry’s, the shaving products company launched by Warby Parker cofounder Jeff Raider earlier this year, just seven months. Read...Ignite Lab Inc.
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